Welcome to Camino Real. It gives us great pleasure to welcome you to this hotel which as you know has a long tradition dating, more or less, back to the year you were born. We know that people like you have a relationship with this establishment that goes beyond any familiarity or tradition; that it operates at a much deeper and instinctive level as if the textures, the colors, the shadows of every corner of our hotel were part of your own DNA. For us, guests like you are precious and are endangered and are a model for the others. You can’t be paired with those business travelers who compare our hotel with the other major hotel chains, usually unfavorably, complaining that the doors of the rooms here do not close properly or that the hallways are too long and wide. They can’t understand that this is more than a place for passing, that there is a spirituality within these walls.

Therefore, we take pains to get to know our real customers, even those like you who have only had the opportunity to stay with us two or three times in their lives. We are aware, for example, that your aunt brought you for the first time to 1978 for a drink in the hotel lobby with her friend Tere, when you were a child, and since then the orange colors of the seats and the gridded ceiling entry would become fixed on your mind. We are aware that you are usually tortured by the past, but also that you perversely enjoy this torture, which is one of the reasons for which you always yearn to return to us. Or that you studied at a school a few blocks from here, living a teenage life nourished by impossible loves and the melancholy of believing lost even that which was in front of you, such as your own youth and the endless possibilities of the future, and that you would project these obsessions of yours in long walks into the gardens and the streets around this neighborhood. And since now all those things that you feared to lose are effectively lost, and that you are now a stranger in your own town, you still have us: this place where everything can be revived, where one can sit in our garden to observe the line of sunshine onto the grass as the hours pass. We like to see you get into these states of saudade, carefully watching the yellow and pink and blue walls of our interiors, covering each of the public and private, national and personal events you lived or lost in recent decades, wanting to recognize and living the fantasy of recovering them here.

But of course we will never tell you that we know these things about you. We do not want to inconvenience or embarrass you in any way. Here at Camino Real we know that we must make the customer feel at home, while also respecting their privacy. We thus work for you so that when you pass through the building you may have the impression that you yourself are the detective and narrator of an unconscious landscape that only belongs to you. We are a cast of actors that begin to operate the moment you enter into the hotel, where every sound we produce, every clinging of dishes, every pot and every texture you see along your path may appear to be casually there but actually have been carefully placed to summon your personal ghosts. We know that at night you sometimes go out to the hallway to find them, and that when you go to sleep you dream that you can see your grandmother in the lobby, your aunt Elsa offering a plush dinner for a couple dozen relatives and friends at the Puebla Event Room, that peek through semi-open rooms with tables populated with now deceased writers and artists in animated after-dinner conversations on tables with tablecloths stained by wine and cigarette ash, witnessed by you as a child. Every morning you wake up with a swirl of official events, national news time when this country was the only imaginable world for you and the only imaginable reality; which makes you realize that migrating from one place to another feels like moving from reality to a dream, but that at some undefined point that dream becomes the reality and the prior reality one had left has by then acquired the intangibility of the dream world.

We were made to enact these feelings. Each of the rooms, day and night, aspire to host not only individuals but different sensations that we try to make percolate as fragrances (with the exception of cigarette smoke which we try, admittedly not always successfully, to eliminate). We want to permeate our rugs and lamps with layers of existential essences. Our sincere hope is that, when the time comes (hopefully as late as possible) when you have to leave us from the terrestrial world, your experiences and memories may be integrated on our campus so that others can sense them and learn from them. By then perhaps we may no longer be a hotel, since competition has begun to push us out of this business. We are instead considering to become a mausoleum for those interested in unearthing emotions, who may be willing come here to spend months, years, decades, dedicated to finding them amidst our benevolent maze.